This story has ended. I know it's not quite the Hollywood ending we were expecting, but that's the way life is sometimes. Thank you for taking this ride with me. I've matured so greatly since Oddfellow first began. I've celebrated new life and mourned loss. And more than anything, I've lived. But now this life has changed, and it's time to move on. The new story, the new life, the new journey begins ... now.

Once upon a time there was a man who spent years of his life hiding away from friends and family for fear that they might discover his secret, which was that he drank too much. It was a shameful secret, and he couldn't bear the thought of revealing it to those he knew and loved. It was easier, he thought, to hide it away. But in the act of hiding the secret, he also hid himself. He was very meticulous in keeping his distance from everyone, especially from those he loved, because it was so shameful a secret. But then one day he stopped drinking. It took him a while to clear his head afterwards, but when clarity returned he saw how much distance had accumulated between himself and the rest of the world. He was an island. For a while, he thought this was his punishment for having kept such a shameful secret for so long. But then slowly he started reaching out to people again - both friends and family. At first he was terrified that he would be ignored; or worse, rejected. But that didn't happen. In fact, quite the opposite happened. The family he had tried so hard to push away began to reach back for him. He tried to explain to them that he'd had a secret, and he had not wanted them to know. But now they did, and they said it was ok. Suddenly they were all around him. The family that he had pushed away in shame had embraced him, and the friends he once thought couldn't possibly be friends with him because he had kept them at such a distance were strangely and beautifully welcoming. And he wanted to repent, to apologize for being so guarded and distant for so long, but he didn't. Somehow he knew it wouldn't matter; their friendship and love did not spring from contrition but rather was a byproduct of honesty. The true fallacy, he later learned, had been in trying to appear honest through dishonest means. His secret was that he drank too much, and he also tried to keep it secret that he was imperfect, flawed. But his flaws made him who he was, made him human, and it was the human in him that people loved, not the secret.

So. We drove to Albuquerque last week for vacation. I have to admit I found mild humor in the irony of embarking on a 700 mile road trip with the woman who's decided she doesn't want to be married to me anymore. (And I know that's not entirely fair; it wasn't her decision alone that led us here.) I figured it was going to be either excruciating or exciting, but frankly it was neither. Instead, it was simply relaxing (at least for me, anyway; we stayed at my mom's house, which added to the irony for Ari, I'm sure). She and I were kind and respectful to each other, which is how we've been for the last several years, really. During the quiet times on the trip, I tried to pinpoint exactly when the marriage started heading south, but everything prior to July 2006 is kind of a blur, stitched-together periods of deep depressive drinking and half-hearted attempts at getting sober. Read more »

I've been devouring Salman Rushdie lately. I finished Shalimar the Clown a week or so ago, and I'm sinking back into The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which I never finished the first time around. I think I came to within 100 pages of finishing last time, which is absurd! Who quits a book that close to the end? I don't even recall why I never finished it the first time, but I'm sure it wasn't Rushdie's fault. I probably got sidetracked by real life or something.

Shalimar the Clown is an amazing book. It is a simple story of a complicated life. But the best parts for me were not those dealing with the title character but rather the women in his life. The segment called Boonyi, about Shalimar's wife, and the prologue and epilogue segments called India and Kashmiri, were graceful and calming despite their energy and occasional fervor. Overall, the book is an honest account of human emotion, of love and hate, those strange bedfellows that lead people to do the brash and silly (sometimes horrible) things they do. And while the story of Max is necessary, it was not my favorite; there were times during his segment that I found my mind wandering to Boonyi and the village of Pachigam. Personally, I found life in paradise (Kashmir) far more intriguing than life in hell (Europe during WWII).

Shalimar the Clown is as eloquent as Midnight's Children, which is perhaps why I liked it so much. I've also read Fury, which I don't remember much about, and I've tried to wade through The Moor's Last Sigh. But Moor is hard for me; maybe I'm just not intellectual enough to grasp all the word play. Or maybe I started it at the wrong time in my life; maybe I'll have better luck later.

However, I need to finish TGBHF first. Hopefully the tragedy in my own life won't keep me from finishing it this time. In a way, this book has been sort of helpful so far. Umeed, the narrator, tells the story of a lifelong case of heartbreak. After all, he's in love with a woman he can never have, or at least he never has hold of her for very long. Here's the conclusion of Chapter 3, which strikes some familiar chords with me:

Now there is at last a new flowering of happiness in my life. (This, too, will be told at the proper time.) Perhaps this is why I can face the horror of the past. It's tough to speak of the beauty of the world when one has lost one's sight, an anguish to sing music's praises when your ear trumpet has failed. So also it is hard to write about love, even harder to write lovingly, when one has a broken heart. Which is no excuse; happens to everyone. One must simply overcome, always overcome. Pain and loss are "normal" too. Heartbreak is what there is (p. 85).

As unbelievable as it may sound, I don't think my heart has ever been truly broken before. It's all quite new (or maybe it's been long enough that I didn't remember what it felt like), and perhaps Umeed will help me to better understand what's happening.

For Mother's Day, we went on a hike in an area of southeast Austin that is east of the airport and south of the river. It goes by the especially clever name of Southeast Metro Park. Ari thinks that is the name the County is using until someone donates lots of money to it, and then it'll inherit the name of that person. The park is pretty large overall. It has a handful of baseball fields, some daytime camping facilities, and a 2.2-mile hiking trail loop, which is where we were headed. There was a large map at the parking lot detailing the trail route. There were two ponds about 3/4 of a mile down on the left (or about 1.5 miles if we went to the right). We agreed to go left, to visit the first pond but not necessarily the second. Two-point-two miles, I reasoned, might be a bit much for the kids, so we tentatively agreed to turn around at the first pond and come back the way we came without completing the entire trail loop. Read more »

Gabriel is dabbling in the dark art of esotericism through the manipulation of traditional knock-knock jokes:

Gabriel: Knock knock!

Ari: Who's there?

Gabriel: Banana!

Ari: Banana who?

Gabriel: Flower.

I've come to the conclusion that the best way for me to ENJOY baseball is to avoid watching Astros games. Because, see, I like the Astros. I like them a lot. I know most of the players pretty well. I got upset that Garner kept Lidge in the closer's spot for so long last year, and I got equally upset when he took Burke out of the line-up a couple weeks ago. Basically, I've adopted them as "my team." And they're not always real good, which I guess is a polite way of saying: Sometimes, they kinda suck. And so when I watch one of their games, I don't really enjoy it. I get worked up. I shout things at the t.v. that they never hear. And even if they did hear me, would they listen to me? Probably not, considering I don't kow much about baseball. So I guess I should to stop watching them play. And here I'm saying all this the day after their two-game winning streak against the Reds, which, yes, I've watched. But I know they're just toying with me and when tonight's third tomorrow's fourth and final game in Cincinnati ends, we're headed back to the smackdowns. Not a very optimistic view, I know, which is conflicting - do I want to be a sucker or a cynic? I'm good at being a sucker, so maybe it's time to give cynic a try.

So I had tentatively planned to tell a story at Fray Cafe this year, but I decided against it at the last minute. It was to be a public announcement of my rehabilitation. I was going to tell stories about times when I was drunk, about things I did while I was drunk, or at least the things I remember doing while I was drunk. It seemed like a good idea at the time, this public catharsis; a step toward conquering my addiction if you will, a way to say, "Here are some of the things I did in the absence of rational thought." More importantly, I wanted to say, "I am not these things." It was going to be my new beginning, my first public step toward separating myself from the actions of my past. Some of the stories are pretty funny now (like many funny things, they were not funny at the time), and I'm sure they would have drawn a laugh or two, but at the last minute I decided against it. Even Ari hadn't heard some of these stories, and it just didn't seem right to share them with the community before I shared them with her.

And maybe it'll never feel ok to air those stories, even after telling them all to Ari. Or maybe they'll end up in my fiction, if I ever start writing again. Which reminds me, I met Parke Godwin at Bubonicon one year when I was about 17. I asked him for advice on becoming a better writer and he said, "Join the Army." Read more »

Tu fe fue fuerte pero necesitaste una prueba
La viste bañarse desde el techo
Su belleza y la luz de la luna te derrocó
Te ató a una silla de la cocina
Rompió tu trono y cortó tu pelo
Y de tus labios sacó el aleluya

Scouring YouTube for Jeff Buckley's version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah led me to this translation of Rufus Wainwright's version. I'm not too impressed with Wainwright's primarily because it sounds too much like John Cale's version, which for me is The First Best Verison (even better than Cohen's version if you ask me). Yes, John Cale's is the best, but Buckley's is quickly finding its way deep into my heart. (Thanks, Ari, for reminding me about Buckley.)

So I found out there's a name for me: "functioning alcoholic." That's an alcoholic who can hold down a job. This doesn't say anything about the quality of the work produced, but someone who manages to keep a job and be a drunk at the same time is considered to be "functioning."

Ari takes this one step further and calls me a "high-functioning alcoholic." This doesn't mean I was drunk AND stoned, it just means that I was often able to carry on conversations and even perform in ways that would suggest I was completely sober even when I was completely drunk. I'm guessing that most of our friends, those we see on a daily or weekly basis, had no idea I was drunk most of the time. Sure, they might have seen me drinking. But they often only saw one or two drinks. They didn't see the other five or eight I'd already consumed. I could carry myself mostly well while drunk. I don't think I ever slurred; I could usually tell when I was getting to that point and I could pull back just enough to keep from being physically obvious. As for the smell of my breath, well, I learned that it was always good to have a bottle of mouthwash nearby. (I never drank the mouthwash, for what it's worth. I may have been a drunk, but I was never THAT desperate.) Read more »